Best Local SEO Friendly WordPress Plugins

Written by: Jason Bayless | October 08, 2015

Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are a key source of high traffic for a number of sites, which is why so many people often ask about the effectiveness of SEO plugins that can ultimately enhance the SEO regarding their own WordPress sites.

Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin is by far one of the most downloaded plugins offered by WordPress. It’s a comprehensive, all-inclusive solution for all your site’s SEO needs. This ingenious plugin enables you to include an SEO title along with meta descriptions and keywords to every page and post on your site.

Also, you easily create a customized title for your primary archives, tag and category pages, and your site in general. Whenever you update your website, the plugin also adds Sitemaps, Twitter Cards, Open Graph meta data, and pings the search engines as well.

2. LinkPatrol

Want a premium plugin that will enable you to manage all your site’s links with just a few clicks of the mouse? LinkPatrol is right for you. With LinkPatrol, you can easily track every outgoing link on your website, determine which ones are leaking ‘juice’, and much more. Overall, LinkPatrol is efficient at providing a super quick way to clean up your spammy links, anchor text, and any link juice issues using a very fast and super intuitive user interface.

3. Rel NoFollow Checkbox

Once you link your site to an external one, you’re automatically giving up some of your website’s authority to that particular link. However, if you don’t wish to do that, you can simply add a ‘nofollow’ attribute to the link in order to solve the problem.

A basic WordPress plugin like Rel NoFollow Checkbox will simply add a checkbox into the insert link popup of the post editor in WordPress. By default, the popup already contains a checkbox that lets you open up links using a new tab. But, if you’re adding an external link, just make it ‘nofollow’ by checking the box.

4. Broken Link Checker

Broken links not only frustrate your visitors, but they often impact the SEO on your site as well. To ensure all your links are still working, it’s best to check them periodically in order to locate any broken links so you can readily fix them, especially if you’ve been running a blog or site for quite awhile.

Broken Link Checker is a 100 percent free plugin that enables you to easily find and fix any broken links without disturbing the integrity of your posts or the need to edit them, which makes it one of the most useful plugins that WordPress offers. The only real downside is that sometimes it can draw on your resources and therefore slow down the overall speed of your server. In fact, some hosting providers have already blocked it on their servers in order to prevent this from happening.

Other WordPress SEO Tips

When it comes to high search engine rankings, the overall speed of your site is a very important factor to consider. Sites that load faster will easily outrank ones that are significantly slower. Therefore, be sure your WordPress website loads as fast as possible. As you’re spending your time and energy to optimize your content strategy, take a few minutes to ensure that your site speed is fully optimized as well. Check the speed of your site with tools like Pingdom and Google Page Speed for best results.

Another tip is to install and launch a caching plugin on your site. Also, to give your website an even bigger boost, set up a CDN service in order to work alongside the caching plugin. By doing so, this will greatly improve the load times of your web pages.

Last, only upload images that are optimized. Loading images can have a direct effect on the speed of your website in general. However, by fully optimizing them you can considerably improve the performance of your site.

If none of these tips help you improve your website’s page speed, chances are it’s your web host provider’s fault, in which case you should get a different hosting provider.